Loading ...Out of Syrian conflict, a musical-visual journey, different for everyone
Collaboration always offers surprises, particularly collaboration that employs chance and ambiguity as defining principles.
Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, an organization devoted to Arab cultural life, rarely occupies familiar ground, whether in the performances it presents or in those it nurtures.
But at 8 p.m. Friday at the Painted Bride Art Center (with a free and open-to-the-public reception from 6 to 7:30 p.m.), Al-Bustan will venture down a particularly mysterious path with the presentation of a completely new collaborative piece by cellist and composer Kinan Abou-afach and visual artist and digital designer Ayman Alalao.
Both were born in Syria and their joint piece, {De} Perception: Live Art & Music, promises a complex and layered experience, one traversed by musical and visual pathways leading those who hear and see it toward the unpredictable and unknowable.
“I had a vision for these visuals for this story,” Alalao, 29, said Wednesday, chatting in a University City coffee shop with his friend and collaborator, Abou-afach. “I want the audience to answer, to discover this story in their own way. Every aspect, you can see it in different ways. Some people understand it in a positive way. Some people understand it in a negative way.
“This actually is what leads us to the theme of the project – how we grow up with ideas when we are children. Now, when we’re grown up, we see it completely differently.
“What’s happening now in Syria, we had our old beliefs; now, when we see it in reality, it is different. Different people I grew up with in the same community can see it completely differently.”
Abou-afach, 38, who studied performance in Damascus and who has scored for film and theater, says he is haunted by the complex and wrenching unrest in his native land. But at this point, it is almost unbearable to discuss it with those still there.
“I couldn’t talk to my parents anymore about what’s happening,” Abou-afach said. “I just call them. ‘How are the flowers? How is the weather?’ I cannot ask them anything else. I want to skip today. I want to go to yesterday and think about tomorrow. Let’s skip today, cut it out. Have a blank memory.”
That sense of moving through a blank “today” – informed by memory and enticed by imagination – intensifies the unusual sound environment of the piece. Part of Abou-afach’s music for {De} Perception consists of created and manipulated electronic sound and part is scored for live musicians – in this case, Al-Bustan’s Takht Ensemble: Abou-afach on cello, Hanna Khoury on violin, Hicham Chami on qanun, and Hafez Kotain on percussion.
Alalao will also perform – he will manipulate digital animations projected behind the four musicians.
The sound of the music, thanks to a computer program of Alalao’s own devising, will also trigger visual activity. Images will change and stretch and evolve in response to the music.
The whole constitutes a kind of fragmented and veiled story. The pain of Syria, so riven by strife, lies behind all, quite literally. Alalao has drawn precise images of Syrian scenes that form a kind of drone tone behind moving projected abstractions.
But those “real” drawn scenes are extremely difficult to read across the jittery sound-activated panorama.
The calligraphic text of the poem, “Between Tomorrow and Yesterday,” by fellow Syrian Rahman Khallouf, who lives in Paris, also appears, disappears, and mutates as part of the visual display.
The result is a story – but what is the story? Is it political? Is it apolitical tragedy? How does it end? Does it end?
“It’s the same as what’s happening,” said Alalao. “We don’t know what the conclusion is. At this moment, I think everyone has their own conclusions, and that won’t change. Everyone has their own scenario.”
Abou-afach urges those who see hope in the piece to embrace it.
“The way the musicians will begin – one by one to enter the space through the audience – they will leave,” he said.
“They’ll leave one by one until only the violin is standing up. Maybe the violin is your childhood memory.”
MUSIC/ART
{De} Perception8 p.m. Friday at the Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St.
Tickets: $15-$30.
Information: 267-809-3668 or www.albustanseeds.org
Source: www.philly.com